Chapter One: Filicide CHAPTER ONE Filicide AS MIDNIGHT APPROACHED, ONLY A few hours before the last winter storm of 1992--a tremendous thunder blizzard that descended from the High Alps and onto our lands to envelop the manor in a tempest of blinding white--my eldest brother, Augustin, accused our parents of murder. Our estate--a sprawling tract nestled in the forests of the Alpine foothills near the Swiss-Austrian border, property that had been in my family for generations--was remote enough that we siblings were quite sheltered (despite being almost twelve years old, I had to that point never set foot on land that my family did not own) but I knew instinctively that filicide was no light thing. Still, it says something that my first reaction wasn't shock that my mother and father might be capable of such an act. Instead, perhaps as a consequence of being the youngest and the only girl, I was struck with a vague feeling of betrayal; the sting of exclusion and of shadowy conspiracies conducted in my absence. To an outsider those elements of the accusation might have seemed odd things to be upset about. But, dynasties as old as ours collect dark secrets like other families keep old photo albums; packed away in dusty corners and ignored for years, until cracked open in the presence of others and exposed to the light once more to accomplish some political end. On that dark night at least, the murder of a member of the "direct line" did not seem all that unlikely a secret for my family to harbor. Even after the import of my brother's accusation sank in, it was not the killing itself but rather the fact that the existence of an older sister had somehow been kept from me that occupied my thoughts. I had heard nothing of this mysterious sibling prior to the indictment Augustin leveled against our parents, and something about that felt unforgivable. Though by the next day the cold realization of what it meant to live under the rule of potentially homicidal parents would take hold, as I tried to sleep that night I was oblivious to that particular danger. Instead, I found myself trying to picture my slain older sibling and, as my visions of her solidified, it was mournful thoughts of sisterhood lost that haunted me. She appeared in none of the family photos or portraits that I had seen and therefore, I reasoned, her existence must have been deliberately (and quite thoroughly) erased. But this made her malleable somehow and, when my mind's eye gazed in her direction, it naturally invited invention (an urge that my eleven-year-old imagination was all too happy to indulge). It was a strange thing to summon her specter that way, but the act of having, however briefly, conjured it forged in me an affinity with this lost and mysterious relation that would, as it happened, later prove quite fateful. WE DIDN'T KNOW it that night, but the approaching storm was to mark the beginning of the end of a long and cold winter. Almost a month earlier, Augustin had come home from boarding school for the winter break. His roommate Yves had come along to stay with us. At sixteen, a year older than Augustin, Yves (who by some cruel twist of fate was cursed with "Gaspard" as one of his middle names) was the son and heir apparent of Klaus Böhm. I had seen him from a distance once or twice some years before when his family visited our estate, but it had been a long time and, that winter, I almost failed to recognize him at first. He had grown older but his body had outpaced his face, which hadn't lost the soft, childlike features that I remembered from earlier encounters. There was an effete and almost feminine character to the elegant way he carried himself. He was certainly very attractive, yet with his dark hair slathered with gel in what I assumed was an effort to make it stylish (but instead came off looking overly slick), he seemed caught between ages; trying very hard indeed to counter the tendency his boyish face had of making him look fourteen. Slick or not, he was the immediate subject of my first, only, and very intense, preadolescent crush. Yves's family had a smaller estate somewhere near Vienna but he had spent his early years in France, where his father had a diplomatic posting (and a number of business interests besides). When he spoke German, his accent, which he was at pains to conceal, was a source of endless fascination to me. My mother's family was from Vienna and, though we were expected to lurk in the background in the evenings as the adults socialized, our early, overheard conversations were predominantly in an aristocratic brand of Viennese German, an accent I still struggle to suppress. On the other hand, and despite the French taint, Yves delivered the language via a strong dose of rarefied and erudite High German. I must have been on his last nerve more than once, but he was endlessly patient with me that winter as I asked him to repeat a particular sentence or turn of phrase over and over just to hear the sound of his voice. The tutors who were normally flown in to give my brother Bastien (who, despite being almost two years older than me, was regularly mistaken for the youngest of the siblings) and me lessons in everything from classical studies to geometry had been given their holiday by that time. I certainly did not miss them or the bland memorization by recitation that characterized their methods of instruction. My own lessons increasingly focused on protocol and etiquette, subjects I despised (though I would have been far more horrified had I seen them for the hints which they essentially were: early innuendoes of a dutiful and subservient future that was already being planned for me). The reprieve from lessons meant that, for weeks, the four of us fell into a nearly inseparable pack. Yves's presence evened out the balance between my brothers and me, which had always been lopsided in their favor before his arrival. No matter the game, Augustin and Yves would play as opposing captains; honorable rivals; best friends who, as noble officers of adversarial armies, regretted the unfortunate political circumstances that made them, for the duration of the contest at least, enemies. I remember resorting to any artifice to ensure that I found myself on Yves's team for board games, hide-and-seek, and snowball fights. Outdoors he was quick and clever and, to my delight for by that year I was an avid climber, prone now and again to bear me on his shoulders or boost me up into trees, showering us both with falling snow from the disturbed branches of the Austrian pines that dominated the forests around the manor. Once high enough, I would hide among the boughs looking for signs of the enemy but, I must admit, I spent more time watching a rosy-cheeked Yves bounding through the drifts and building snow fortifications beneath my surveillance post than keeping watch for Augustin and Bastien's inevitable sneak attack. It was after one of these daylong forays into the snow that Augustin related his horrible tale. As the sun set and brought that enveloping dark that one only finds far from the glare of civilization, there was nothing left but to retire back into the manor. Teeth chattering, soaked to the skin with melting snow, and desperate to avoid the attention of adults, we crept past the candlelight that flickered from the Grand Foyer, up the marble staircases, and across the long hallway to the manor's residence wing. Augustin led us into one of the unused corner suites that he and Yves had converted into their (purportedly secret) "headquarters." It was wonderfully mysterious, and that our older counterparts had revealed it to "the babies" (as Bastien and I had been branded), much less invited us in, was a special treat. We peeled off the outer layers of our sodden winter clothes and watched impatiently as Yves lit the tapers in the candelabras and set a crackling blaze in the foyer's yawning marble fireplace. We huddled together on the floor, wrapped in blankets, giggling and still shivering, until the flames urged the chill out of our bones. I remember being afraid that someone would notice how carefully I had maneuvered to sit next to Yves. We watched the fire for a time, listening in silence to the hiss of the not-quite-dry-enough logs. Eventually, Augustin whispered to Yves, who nodded, stood up, and extinguished the candles one by one until only the fireplace was left for illumination. The wind started to pick up, a vague warning of the intensity of the approaching storm. It rattled the windows in the rooms beyond the suite's foyer, adding an altogether spooky atmosphere to the proceedings. Augustin looked at each of us in sequence--three ominously pregnant pauses. When he finally broke the silence, the light from the fireplace played across his face, giving him a sinister appearance. "I want to tell you a story about our sister," Augustin said. "What?" I choked, alarmed. "Me?" I shuddered to imagine Augustin revealing some embarrassing secret of mine in front of Yves (and my mind eagerly called up several mortifying candidates). "I am talking about our other sister," Augustin said. "We don't have another sister," I objected, glancing at Bastien, but he looked just as mystified. "What?" Augustin said, eyebrows rising. "You don't remember?" I shook my head weakly. Augustin acted surprised. "Wait..." he said, and then his voice slipped down to a whisper. "They never told you ?" I had nothing to offer but a blank look. "About your older sister? About what happened to Sophia?" I knew there were many secrets in our family, but the idea that Augustin, alone, had learned one so important was deeply upsetting. Moreover, telling stories was supposed to be all in good fun but, suddenly, Augustin did not sound like he was playing. He was scaring me a little, and from his expression it seemed he was relishing the effect. "It happened a few years after you were born," he continued and, just like that, slipped into the long-hidden tale with an ease that made it seem anything but invented. "Sophia was born in the winter months. Our mother named her despite the family legend." "What legend?" Bastien asked. "That girls named Sophia come to bad ends in our family," Augustin said and rolled his eyes. "Don't you know anything? The name is cursed; was cursed long ago." He grew cross. "And stop interrupting." Cowed, Bastien pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders. "From the day she was delivered, Sophia cried all the time. It got better once she turned two, but by four she was crying all day and all night. Mother tried everything to quiet her. Still, Sophia would go on for hours, until she was so hoarse she could only manage an awful hissing noise." Augustin issued a horrific rasping sound from deep in his throat to demonstrate. On a nearby estate some of our neighbors bred spaniels. They visited us one year, bringing a few of their prized animals along after they had been debarked. It came back to me, that awful, rasping hiss those poor dogs, surgically robbed of their vocal cords, had made. My skin crawled. "The doctors said that if she didn't stop, her voice might be damaged permanently. "Finally," he continued, "after Sophia's fifth birthday, Father had Mother take a vacation to calm her nerves, or that was the story. He sent most of the staff away with her, so the estate was almost empty. The next night, during a tremendous snowstorm, Sophia started crying. Lucas got out of bed to tend to her." Lucas, the impossibly tall, perpetually stiff head butler of the estate, had been serving on the domestic staff since long before I was born. My mother may have led the staff with an iron fist clad in white lace, but the behind-the-scenes workings of the manor were most certainly Lucas's to command. He was as officious as he was efficient and, with a nearly mystical clairvoyance, almost nothing of importance on the estate escaped him. I should have thought him more likely to bite the neck and suck the blood of a child than to "tend to her," but, in that moment, I was too spellbound to wonder after this detail. "As Lucas was climbing the stairs, the crying choked off and then abruptly stopped. Our father, coming from Sophia's room, met Lucas in the hall and sent him back to bed. That was the last time Sophia cried. In fact, no one ever saw her again. "Mother was supposed to be beyond suspicion, but I know she was"--Augustin leaned forward into our half circle--"complicit." After my brother delivered that particular detail, Yves actually looked a little alarmed. "But what happened to Sophia?" Bastien said. Augustin gave him a sinister smile. "They threw her body into a chest in a locked room on the third floor of the West Wing. I bet her corpse has almost totally rotted away by now. That was her bedroom, you know. That's why those rooms are off-limits." This part about the third- and fourth-floor rooms in the West Wing on the other side of the manor being "off-limits" was sort of true, if unenforced. The official explanation (that the wings were closed to save heating the rooms) suddenly sounded like a convenient cover story. "Lucas said that, during winter storms, he could still hear the hiss of Sophia's cry in that hallway." Augustin turned his head to look at us and the shadows cast from the flickering fire played in his eye sockets. For a moment, his face looked like a skull. I had to look away to keep from flinching. Just then the fire popped much louder than usual and threw a flurry of glowing embers out toward us. Bastien let out a shriek, giving us all a start, and frantically brushed a hot coal away from his blanket, but not before it had left a small scorch mark. We all glared at him but, before Augustin could rebuke him, a powerful gust of wind rattled the outside windows again. With a loud slam, the draft that leaked through the old windows blew one of the bedroom doors shut, causing us all to jump. After Yves got up to make sure the remaining doors were secure and returned to our circle, Augustin continued. "You know, for a time Grandfather's dogs used to wander up to the door and whine and scratch to get in." I remembered my Grandfather's Irish wolfhounds, two huge animals that he doted on endlessly and which roamed the manor at will when I was very young. My mother disliked them intensely. A memory struck me then: I was eight years old and happened to be in one of the salons with my mother when an aide leaned down and whispered the news that the last wolfhound had died. It wasn't yet eleven in the morning, but my mother had smiled and ordered a bottle of champagne. "I know Lucas said you can still hear her, but I don't believe that," Augustin said. "That's incredible," Yves breathed, and it seemed to me that there was no acting in it. "I don't believe any of it," I exclaimed, a little too urgently; but maybe I did just a little. Maybe even more than just a little. "Oh," Augustin said, the drama of his delivery gone. "It doesn't matter to me, dear sister. But, in light of the curse, and as the only girl left, maybe you should be on your best behavior?" "My name isn't Sophia, Augustin." "Well," he said, leaning back, "you better hope that is protection enough." AFFECTED BY AUGUSTIN'S story, we had all grown quiet, but before long, Yves started getting antsy. "What are we doing tomorrow?" he demanded of the room in general. "We could go riding in the morning." Augustin shook his head. "My mother is holding an event this weekend. A reception, a formal dinner, then a reception again." "So?" "So, the entire estate will be on edge until it's over," Augustin said, and sighed to himself. "It's best if we just stay upstairs." "The whole weekend?" Yves protested. "Who invented that rule anyhow?" "It's not a rule," Augustin said. "It's just good practice." Yves did not look convinced. "Says who?" "Yves, you don't understand. One doesn't play about when my mother is entertaining." "Come on. Isn't that a little melodramatic? Why don't we go down tomorrow evening and check it out. I mean, it's not like it is some kind of state dinner." My brother sat up and gave Yves a grave look. "Oh, but it is." "Who cares about downstairs?" Bastien said. "We can all play together up here." "Sure," Augustin said, his voice laced with sarcasm. "Grand." "I'm sure some of your formalwear would fit," Yves said, and put on his winningest smile. "Forget it. We aren't invited. It would really be asking for trouble." Augustin was right. My mother's entertainments were extremely elaborate and formal affairs. Dinners served in the Grand Dining Hall during such events were attended to by footmen and waitstaff attired in uniforms that, only later in life, would appear to me to be artifacts from a bygone era. On some of the grander occasions it was not unusual for the doors to the manor and the Grand Dining Hall to be flanked by pikemen in traditional dress; our own palace guard complete with halberds that were most certainly not merely ceremonial. As if that were not enough, at least twice a year my mother would host an event that called for "White Tie with Decorations," compelling my family and our guests to deck themselves out in full regalia, including the gleaming insignias of royal or family orders, neck and breast badges, and collections of medals and ribbons that, in the case of some of our more august visitors, made me wonder how much weight the various awards added to their jackets. In the warmer months, as much as a week before guests were due to arrive, the staffers responsible for the estate grounds could be seen hurrying about to groom the Italian Gardens to my mother's exacting standards, tending the many walking paths that wound their way around the manor, lining them with fresh torches to accommodate evening strolls, or honing the corners of the hedge maze beyond to a keen edge. In cold weather, and though the drifts might reach fifteen feet or more, the snows were carved away along the long drive northeast from the main gate to the manor itself. On more than one occasion, looming ice sculptures nearly ten feet tall appeared virtually overnight, decorating the manor's Grand Foyer, the circle drive, the courtyard, and even lining the approach to the manor proper. As evening fell, they would refract the light cast by the headlights of approaching cars and throw dazzling, prism-bent colors across the snow-covered landscape. For her part, as the date approached, my mother would spend her hours commanding the small army of domestic staff charged with perfecting the estate and the manor in preparation for the arrival of our distinguished guests. She seemed to evolve slowly, day by day, from an already traditional demeanor into the hyperformality and poise she demanded of herself during her entertainments. To my way of thinking, Augustin's fear of trespassing even on the edges of my mother's psyche during her preparations was entirely justified. Years before, on the evening of my seventh birthday, a Thursday before one of my mother's grand events, Augustin tripped me while we were playing tag on the gravel driveway behind the manor. I used my hands to break my fall but only succeeded in skinning my palms badly and embedding the wounds with tiny bits of gravel and grit. Augustin had an occasional penchant for pranks, but this was an unusually mean bit of horseplay, even as between older brothers and their younger sisters. Stunned, I sat on the gravel looking at my bloody palms before the pain set in and I started to cry. "Don't be a baby," Augustin taunted. Annoyed, he grabbed my right wrist, quite roughly, to pull me up. It was perhaps more violent than he intended, and I felt a bolt of searing pain shoot up my arm. I cried out so loudly that he let go, dropped me right back on the ground, and then took a step back. After looking around to see if anyone had heard, he reached for me again more carefully, but, sobbing and feeling deeply betrayed by his sudden and inexplicable transformation from trusted playmate into nasty rival, I squirmed away from him and ran. I found my mother just outside the Grand Dining Hall. She was already in formal attire and conducting members of the domestic staff here and there with curt and elegant hand motions. In retrospect, going to her was a mistake, but what little girl does not crave from her mother a pair of kisses on her wounds; just a hint of affection to remind her that she is entitled to a bit of kindness no matter what other demands weigh in the background? On the contrary, when I interrupted my mother to show her my tattered hands, she lowered her voice into the harsh and biting whisper that was her particular trademark when she was angry. "I'm not sure exactly what convinced you that it was appropriate to address your elders without a proper curtsy first," she hissed. "But, unless you disabuse yourself of that notion immediately , there will be severe consequences." Frozen, half a dozen members of the domestic staff fell silent and looked at me with expressions of dull horror, anxious that my mother's newly inflamed ire should not be redirected at them. Shamed that, in my distress, I had failed to offer her the expected obeisance, I tried to ignore the stinging pain from my hands and stop crying, but managed only to choke my sobs down to a series of halting whimpers. I lowered my gaze to the ground and performed the most formal curtsy I could manage under the circumstances, wincing from the effort to avoid crying out again when I moved my right wrist. When I straightened and looked up again, my mother's expression had transformed from annoyance to cold fury. It was several seconds before I saw what she was looking at. As I had dropped the curtsy I had pulled out the sides of my damask dress and printed the lovely and flowing white garment with bright red fingerprints of blood. "Young lady," my mother barked, the angry whisper gone. "In just a few hours the first of a number of important guests, including two heads of state I might add, will arrive on our estate for the long weekend. If you think I have time for this kind of nonsense you have another thing coming. You will go to your room this instant and stay there until you are summoned." I started sobbing again, put my hands to my stomach to try to quell the knot there, and thus smeared the front of my dress with even more blood. " Now ," my mother snapped, and pointed to the foyer and the marble stairway that led up to the residential wing beyond. I fled before she had a chance to think up something more severe and spent the entire weekend alone in my room, terrified to test the limits of my confinement, and forced to call down to the kitchens for my meals. When I was finally allowed to emerge for breakfast on Monday morning, my wrist had gotten no better. Once my grandfather finally noticed how swollen it had become, he had Dr. Ebner, the kindly old man who had by then served as our family's general practitioner for three generations, flown to the estate via helicopter. I was forced to wait on his arrival in the manor's little sick bay, a claustrophobic room filled with various medical supplies and equipment, some quite modern, and some that may well have been left over from the Second World War. Dr. Ebner pronounced my wrist only badly sprained but, despite his coaxing, as explanation I offered only the meek half-truth that I had fallen. He put a splint on my wrist but the entire experience left a much more enduring impression. If my mother understood the effect her fit of pique had on me that weekend, she never let on. Not knowing any better, the guilt I felt for having somehow failed her tormented me long after. In fact, it was an emotional scar that persisted well into adulthood. Even so, certainly, after that, I never forgot to curtsy to my mother again, and never dared to intrude when she was in the midst of her event preparations. The fire in our "secret headquarters" had been burning quite hot and our clothes were almost completely dry by then, but Augustin added another log to the stack anyhow. Yves was somehow cowed by Augustin's intransigence about the weekend and a long, bored silence followed. Finally, Augustin got up and made his way to the far corner of the foyer. There he opened a wooden cabinet and lifted out an antique gramophone with a large, ornate horn. Though probably refurbished, it must have been nearly a hundred years old. Augustin wound up the handle in the front, put on a disc, and set the needle to playing. A pinched, scratchy version of Chopin strained out of the horn. Yves groaned. "Again? Don't you have anything else? I mean, no one here listens to real music?" "Of course we do," I interjected. "Bastien plays the violin beautifully." "That's not what I'm talking about," Yves said as Bastien began to flush bright red. "I mean like recorded music." "We have plenty in the library," I said. "Wait, what?" Yves said. "Augustin, you never told me that." "We have hundreds, maybe thousands, of records there," I added, eager to please him. "Yeah?" Yves said, squinting at me. "Like Madonna? George Michael? U2?" In fact, I had barely heard of Madonna and had no idea at all who George Michael or U2 were. Augustin started laughing. "What's so funny?" Yves said, glaring at him. Augustin rolled his eyes at Yves before turning to look at me. "Which are your favorite records in the library?" Misunderstanding Augustin's sudden interest, I launched into the topic. "There is the most wonderful recording of Maria Callas singing 'Vissi d'Arte,' from Puccini's Tosca ," I said. "If you close your eyes it will just take you away." Augustin laughed even harder. Yves looked irritated. "What's wrong with Puccini?" Bastien said, concerned. "Yves," Augustin managed, when he finally stopped laughing. "She's talking about our collection of classical records." "Oh, brother," Yves said, and slumped back in despair. I was mystified by the exchange. As boarding school students, Yves and Augustin likely had plenty of opportunity to be exposed to modern music and media. For Bastien and me, who had never been off the estate in our entire lives, it was all a grand mystery. Augustin pointed at the old gramophone. "This has a steel needle too. You can only play the shellac discs. It will ruin vinyl records." Yves squinted at Augustin. "I brought my whole CD collection, you know. Someone must have a stereo somewhere." "We've been over this already," Augustin sighed, and jabbed a thumb at the antique gramophone again. "We're lucky to have this thing." Before that winter, I never had cause to understand how strange the atmosphere my mother had created on the estate actually was. In fact, several years later I made something of a fool of myself when I insisted to my friends that a popular BBC period drama with a huge costume and wardrobe budget was set in the present day and not the late nineteenth century. "I'll go get my violin," Bastien said, having missed the nature of Yves's annoyance. "Don't bother," Augustin said, but the overeager Bastien didn't seem to hear. He bolted up in such a hurry that he tripped over Yves and me, then crashed to the ground and into one of the table legs. In the process he knocked over the empty glass, which fell to the ground and exploded into a hundred shards. "Okay," Augustin said, disgusted, and pointed at the door. "Babies out." Excerpted from Letters from the Dead: A Novel by Isabella Valeri All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
